Plumber, Steamfitter & Shipfitter Industry Pension Plan & Trust v. Siemens Building Technologies Inc.

This appeal probes the legal question whether a collective bargaining agreement covers certain employees, and the fact question whether the trustees of an ERISA employee benefits plan had a legitimate purpose to audit certain payroll records of the Appellant employer’s operations, as the trustees claim, or were being used by a trade union, as the employer claims, to increase union membership by establishing that union work was being performed by nonunion employees.

The trial court took testimony and examined documents and concluded that the collective bargaining agreement was intended to define covered employees as all employees performing the work of installing and maintaining heating, cooling, and ventilation systems, as a legal matter of contract interpretation, and then found, as a fact, that the trustees had a legitimate trust purpose of making certain that the employer was contributing all the funds required by the collective bargaining agreements and the terms of the various trust instruments.

*967 The employer contends on appeal that the trial court erred as a legal matter in construing the collective bargaining agreement, and clearly erred as a matter of fact in finding…